A New Titanic on the Drawing Board, but Where’s the Captain?

A recorded message from Clive Palmer, the tycoon behind the Titanic II project, was played at a press conference in Hong Kong last week. Mr. Palmer also skipped a gala in Macau that was held to promote the project.

Kees Metselaar for the International Herald Tribune

By BETTINA WASSENER

February 19, 2013

MACAU — The gala was a grand affair: hundreds of well-dressed guests, lots of musical entertainment, a meal replicating the 11-course feast served to first-class passengers on the Titanic the night it sank and the promise of meeting the wealthy Australian who plans to rebuild not just the menu, but the entire ship.

Just one thing was missing Saturday at the event in Macau: the host, Clive Palmer, a self-made multimillionaire — multibillionaire by some reckonings — who is funding the venture. Mr. Palmer, a larger-than-life character who is as colorful as he is vocal, said he had been held up on other business in Australia.

For most entrepreneurs, a project of this sort — experts estimate the ship, to be constructed in the Chinese city of Nanjing, could cost more than $200 million — would be the focus of their travel and business plans.

Mr. Palmer, however, is a busy man.

“Yes, I was sorry to miss the event, but I got caught up in a meeting on another new project,” Mr. Palmer said by phone from Brisbane on Sunday, adding that the project had to do neither with mining, the cornerstone of his considerable wealth, nor with shipping, but something “completely new.”

Mr. Palmer’s business empire is all over the map. He owns five golf courses in Australia and three resorts, including one in Tahiti.

He has mining and other natural resource assets of the sort that form a large part of the Australian economy. Among them are a nickel refinery and large tracts of land containing coal and iron ore deposits in the states of Queensland and Western Australia.

Then there are the 150 racehorses, five corporate jets and more than 100 vintage cars, which he is planning to exhibit at one of his resorts later this year. Oh, and there is also a large and growing collection of dinosaur models, among them a life-size Tyrannosaurus rex that looms over one of his golf courses.

Despite that varied portfolio, the Titanic project has been greeted with raised eyebrows — in part because of Mr. Palmer’s overall image in Australia as a brash, eccentric entrepreneur.

“In a way, people don’t take him seriously,” said a mining analyst in Sydney, who declined to be identified because he does not formally analyze Mr. Palmer’s business dealings. “You have to discount much of what he says and does with many grains of salt.”

Underlining the split emotions over Mr. Palmer, the Australian National Trust last year added him to its list of National Living Treasures, which includes people like Nicole Kidman; Kylie Minogue; and Paul Keating, a former prime minister of Australia.

The decision brought a fair amount of uproar in Australia.

“There is a sort of grudging respect for him,” said Jason West, a former investment banker who is now an associate professor at Griffith University in Brisbane. “It is very hard to get a handle on him and his business empire,” Mr. West added, “but he has an eye for value — no doubt about it.”

Mr. Palmer is also both outspoken and litigious. Political quarrels, for example, prompted him in November to quit the Liberal National Party, of which he had been a member for many years. And on the legal front, Mr. Palmer has begun legal proceedings against Citic Pacific, a Chinese company working to extract iron ore from one of his sites in Western Australia, over the timing of royalty payments due to him.

Mr. Palmer, 58, dropped out of law school and began his working life as a real estate agent.

Most of his wealth stems from the purchases of land that holds iron and coal, whose prices later soared, thanks largely to the ravenous appetite of China.

Mr. Palmer’s acquisition of a nickel refinery from the mining giant BHP Billiton turned out to be similarly clever — or lucky — analysts say. Nickel prices climbed after the purchase and the refinery now turns a nice profit.

Not all his plans materialize, however. A stock market listing of Resourcehouse, an entity grouping Mr. Palmer’s coal and iron ore assets, was planned in Hong Kong, but pulled in 2011. Meanwhile, the coal sites in Queensland, eastern Australia, require huge investments before coal can actually be mined and shipped.

“There are significant challenges to convert an empty paddock into an operating mine,” said Mr. West of Griffith University.

As for the Titanic II, as Mr. Palmer has christened the ship, if all goes according to plan, it will take to the sea by 2016.

It will be equipped with high-technology engines, modern conveniences like air-conditioning, 840 cabins and, of course, more lifeboats than the original.

In another big departure from the original — and one that reflects Mr. Palmer’s business ties with Chinese companies — the Titanic II will be built by CSC Jinling Shipyard, a Chinese state-owned company that is also building four bulk carriers for Mr. Palmer’s nickel business. A big reason to commission the Titanic II was to give his Chinese partner the chance to prove itself in the cruise-ship-building business, Mr. Palmer said.

China, he said, holds a “dominant position in the cargo business, but they have less than 2 percent in passenger ships.”

The Titanic II, with its universal appeal, Mr. Palmer said, “could become a national showcase for China” and demonstrate that the country has the technical ability to build ships for that segment of the market.

Already, interest among potential passengers has been intense, though construction has not even started.

Blue Star Line, the company managing the Titanic II project, has received tens of thousands of inquiries, and half a dozen people from around the globe have offered to pay more than $1 million to be on the vessel’s maiden voyage, James McDonald, the marketing director, said at a news conference in Hong Kong on Saturday before the Macau gala.